PEORIA — It’s between classes, and Peoria Police Officer Daniel Duncan is strolling the beat, so to speak, in the hallways of Manual Academy.

He’s dressed in the basic officer training uniform, accessorized with handcuffs, scanner, radios, a Taser, pepper spray and a .40-caliber Glock handgun. On any given day, Duncan might wear the standard officer’s uniform or the standard casual uniform, polo shirt and khakis.

The place, the clothes, and especially the gun are props in a long-running dispute between Peoria School District 150 and its school resource officers about just what the SROs’ role is in the schools. Are they full-fledged police officers for a school district — as they think of themselves — though state law prohibits school districts from operating a campus police force? Or are they something different, resources for keeping schools safe and students out of jail?

An odd, unexpected twist threw Duncan and three other Peoria police officers into the middle of the fight in January. He loves it.

“This is it, this is where we need to be,” Duncan says of his stint at Manual, a school he says is unfairly and negatively stereotyped. “I’ve done more rewarding work here than in 13 years on the police force.”

Duncan has worked in vice and drugs, traffic and most recently, community service. But working with students and Manual’s SROs has upended his notion of traditional police work.

“Schools are the foundation. Students are going to be the adults who become taxpayers, or they’re going to be the adults we’ll be arresting,” he says. “I guess I never really looked at it until I started talking to kids one on one, finding out their problems.”

Dealing with special-education students, whose discipline is regulated by federal law, was a new experience for Duncan. Seeing a male school resource officer cry when a student told him she was pregnant surprised him. Watching another transform a threatening conflict between two students into a laugh-filled peace was an eye-opener.

“That’s unheard of in law enforcement. We would’ve said, ‘You’re going to jail.’”

Having city police officers in the schools actually brings District 150 in line with the majority of Illinois’ public school districts. Typically, school districts contract with their local law enforcement agency for police services.

District 150 had been one of just two public school districts in the state with its own trained, armed police officers when the School Board began trying to change the culture of the force — adopting policies that changed titles from police officers to school resource officers, removed their arrest powers and their ability to carry guns off duty.

Page 2 of 2 - Then the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, after realizing its oversight, deactivated District 150’s police force, leaving the district with unarmed SROs right before school resumed after Christmas break. The city of Peoria stepped in with a temporary fix, providing police officers for the three high schools and Woodruff Career and Technical Center.

The City Council and School Board are expected to settle on a temporary contract in April. The district would reimburse the city at a rate of about $63 an hour for the services of four city officers until the end of the school year. Other issues, such as whether Peoria officers will rejoin SROs next school year, haven’t been discussed.

School resource officers’ roles aren’t clear yet, either, said Monica Wilson, interim president of the SROs union, Police Benevolent Protection Agency Local 114. She has asked School Board members to support amending current Illinois law to allow school districts to operate campus police forces.

The dispute within District 150 is part of a broader national debate. On one side, there are calls for more armed officers in schools. On the other, there’s a movement away from policies that criminalize minor student offenses, leading to what has increasingly been called the school-to-prison pipeline.

Duncan, a 1995 graduate of Manual, falls between the two. He’d like to see guns restored to District 150’s SROs. But he’d also like to see police officers focus more on crime prevention than arrests.

“If I were police chief,” he says, “every officer would have to do an internship at a school.”

Pam Adams can be reached at 686-3245 or padams@pjstar.com. Follow her on Twitter @padamspam.